Steve B.
Yelp
You may have been someplace like Harbor Restaurant for dinner before prom. Your teenage hormones in full bloom, you thought that anything "by the water" was romantic. Your teenage palate thought that anything better than Applebee's was gourmet. Then you go back, years later, and think to yourself: Was this place always so... "meh?"
We should have known better. The website is beautifully constructed with appetizing photos of the food, and premium prices on the menu. Our expectations were accordingly high for a special-occasion family dinner. But the restaurant's location -- halfway up the wharf -- screams tourist trap. You're paying for the view, not the food. Plan accordingly.
The restaurant boasts the WORLD'S LARGEST BUS CART. It fits between tables with about an inch to spare on each side, so long as diners fully push in their chairs. The staff is apparently doomed for all eternity to push it around the dining room, like some sort of seafood Sisyphus, so that every twenty minutes during your meal, you have to scooch your chair forward to allow the WORLD'S LARGEST BUS CART to pass behind you.
The restrooms were maintained with the whimsical, carefree attitude of a southeast Ohio Mobil station. Toilet paper batted for .500, in the sense that the men's but not the women's bathroom had any.
For appetizers: The onion rings were crunchy but tasteless, and served inexplicably with tartar sauce and cocktail sauce (because, seafood restaurant?) and a third sauce that was the unholy love child of barbecue sauce and balsamic vinegar. The "Manila" clams turned out to be mid-size cherrystones; instead of small, delicate clams, these were big and predictably rubbery.
For dinner: The shrimp scampi was over-cooked and under-seasoned, served over undercooked pasta that had a gummy chew. The fried shrimp were similarly under-seasoned and also slightly over-cooked, and the rice pilaf was cold and tasteless.
For drinks: My cocktail was tasty but a little weak, a deficiency perhaps not worthy of mention but for the aging ex-con with the mail-order bride loudly complaining about his also-watered down margarita. The bartender was generous with pours of white wine, which he poured at room temperature, perhaps as part of a bizarre social experiment or encoded cry for help.
Our server was kind, knowledgeable, and helpful and gave us service as good as the environment would permit. That is, when he wasn't deftly navigating somebody's drunk aunt stumbling to the bathroom.
On the plus side, she wouldn't have noticed the lack of toilet paper.